O, great and luminous ones, who came from beyond the stars
To slumber serene beneath the earth of the third sphere
Hearken to me, hear me, O mighty one, O great Khthon
Awaken and hear my adulation, O divine and glorious God of gods
From thy hoary tomb thou shalt ascend
And the earth shall be enraptured by thy majesty

Khthon, to the ancient Lemurians, you assumed the guise
Of a beautiful azure-skinned woman with great black wings
To the Atlanteans, you manifested as a brilliant fiery
Sphere of searing radiant energy, to the peoples of Ultima Thule
And Hyperborea, you took the form of a titanic crystalline dragon

Yet your true form is beyond the ken of men
Darker than the blackest heart of deepest night
More terrifying than the very essence of fear itself
Thou art terror incarnate, from the timeless void you came
Son of Z'xulth, glory to They-Who-Lurk-And-Breed-In-Limbo

Behold these repositories of fearful arcane knowledge
Tomes of aeon's old cursed lore which was surely ancient
Even when the ill fortuned antediluvian civilizations
Which initially articulated it first committed such
Dread lexicons of terror to shuddering memory

Fear these legendary encyclopedia antedeluvia
These ebon necronomica of shunned rites and diabolical adulations
The Tome of Shadows, the Forbidden Books of the First Cataclysm
The Epsilon Exordium, the Scrolls of the Third Circle

The Oracle of Antediluvian Blasphemies, the Diabolist's Lexicon
The Arcana Atra Libri, the Thirteen Cryptical Prophecies of Mu
The Manuscripts of the Cultists of Ur, the Chronicle of Shadows
The Black Bible of Kor-Avul-Thaa, the Ancient Book of the Six Keys

The Cydonia Manifesto, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum
The Star-Maps of the Ancient Cosmographers
The Cursed Books of the Z'xulth, the Praxeum Codex
The Chthonic Chronicles

I now know that there is something inestimably evil
At large throughout the cosmos
It is a ravenous and pitiless storm which rages across the universe
Permeating the very fabric of creation, existing simultaneously
In all dimensions, wholly unconstrained by linear time

This force is the black, quasi-sentient mana which sustains
Such ageless revenants of the Z'xulth as the dread Dwellers
In Eternal Shadow and the unspeakable
They-Who-Lurk-And-Breed-In-Limbo

When beings whose essences are intrinsically malefic
Choose to embrace this dark some energy source
The resultant sinister symbiosis can be sublimely diabolical
As evidenced by the black blight that was the infamous
Pseudo-human sorcerer Lord Angsaar

And of course, the malign Zurra, that abominable
Result of an experiment by the Ersatz Ones gone disastrously wrong
An ill advised attempt to clone the K'laa genetic template
Of mighty Zuranthus in the Mera spawning vats

Beneath the Pre-Cambrian sea, only for the matrix
To become contaminated by the errant cells of a captured
Fiend of Z'xulth, the result was a prime fiend whose capacity for evil
And wanton annihilation was exceeded only by a penchant
For self-aggrandizement and his rampant psychological instability

In many cases, the potential for ruination and domination that
Such entities may aspire to is constrained only
By their own physical and psychological limitations
As the toll which the dark mana takes upon the host's mind
And flesh is not insignificant